The present invention relates to a tubular packaging casing, in particular an artificial sausage casing, based on cellulose and comprising a textile sheet-shaped structure.
As is known, tubular packaging casings of cellulose having a large diameter, in particular in the range from 30 to 180 mm, are reinforced with a fiber web bent to form a tube which is coated with cellulose on its inside and/or outside. In practice, this fiber reinforcement used for seamless tubular casings comprises special long-fibered papers on a basis of adhesively consolidated non-woven fabrics made of randomly deposited hemp fibers. Viscose and/or crosslinked cationic resins such as, for example, epichlorohydrin-polyamine polyamide resins, serve as the binders.
EP-A-0 058 240 has suggested to use also other sheet-shaped structures, for example, woven or knitted fabrics, instead of the customary fiber reinforcement, in the production of sausage casings having a glued seam in the direction of their longitudinal axes. According to this publication, these fabrics are impregnated with viscose solution while being in the web-shaped state and are then subjected to strong transverse stretching forces during regeneration and drying. For this purpose, the viscose-treated fiber web is held at the two edges, for example, by means of needle rollers, gripping clips or expanding rollers, and is stretched in the transverse direction. It is only the final web-shaped, fiber-reinforced cellulose that is bent to form a tube and the edge zones extending in the direction of the longitudinal axis are then joined by a glued seam. However, these casings have not been accepted in practice, due to various disadvantages as compared with seamless tubes.
Recently, wide-meshed tubular nets have been applied for purely decorative reasons to the outsides of seamless, fiber-reinforced cellulose-based sausage casings and have been adhesively bonded to the cellulose layer (DE-U-88 04 123.9). These casings give the sausages a particularly sturdy appearance, but their manufacture is relatively expensive. It is moreover also known to apply a tubular net only in the stuffing procedure to the ready-stuffed sausage (DE-U-88 06 038.1). In this process, the tubular net is, however, not fixed on the surface of the sausage and, as a consequence, it can easily slip and can gradually loosen during ripening of the sausage.